top of page

Rate My Professor:
A Rebuttal

Do not take her. She makes you

talk no matter where you sit.


     I greeted you at the door, another mother’s

     child delivered. You looked away as if a lamb

     had been slain. Your early sounds parsed, seeds

     seeking ground—then whole thoughts crowned.


Ridiculous grader. She actually reads

your work instead of the deserved A.


     So hard to put a score on this—this wrestling with

     your age. Rubrics hold out such promise—then fold,

     fade. Instead of systems: a new thought, like a starling

     transporting a golden bough, was what we praised.


I didn’t come here to read ancient epics, poems, plays.

Remind me again how this gets an engineer employed?


     Leaving Troy, Odysseus had one thing—Ithaca—in mind.

     The gods gave him their scales: slay the proud boy in you

     and die a king regaled. A cyclops, sirens, a bard spared among

     suitors to sing your tale. All of them pleading: Set sail. Set sail.




.

Copyright © 2022  M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved.

Published in Sky Island Journal, Issue #23, Winter 2023. 


From the editors: [This poem] spoke to us immediately. Intensely personal yet wildly accessible, it transports and challenges us in ways that poems seldom do. This powerful, vulnerable, tapestry of human landscape is a meditation on the presence of absence and the absence of presence, and it bears fruit in such beautiful and unexpected ways... The elegance of your craft, and “Rate My Professor: A Rebuttal,” are two gifts that keep on giving; we discover more about them, and ourselves, with every reading.

amber-214x154_edited.jpg
bce.jpg
bottom of page